Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoThey accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It’s interesting how any false narrative starts with a granule of truth.
Kurzgesagt was indeed provided $570,000 in 2015. That money was paid out across the following four years.
They have not continued to accept any amount of money from the Gates foundation.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sorry, I didn’t think the word ‘continued’ would have needed underlining for anyone that could read what I wrote.
Using a piece of factual information to prop up false information within the same sentence is how false narratives take hold.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m unsure we are talking about the same comment. The misinformation is the claim the Gates foundation is continuing to fund Kurzgesagt, when that clearly isn’t the case. This incorrect information is veiled by beginning the statement with the truth of the 2015 grant.
Insofar as the reputational damage Kurzgesagt has incurred, I’m not sure there’s much meat on that bone. Sure, you might believe they have fallen from grace or some such, but as I pointed out in another comment here, we can’t just connect everything under the sun and say ‘group A is bad because groups B through Y are all next to one another and with group Z doing all those injustices, group A is complicit in those crimes’.
To me, the question of whether Kurzgesagt is a Gates mouthpiece is pretty cut and dry. A few reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that the money didn’t keep coming, and it wasn’t much money to begin with. I wouldn’t be going out of my way to talk up my employer to clients if my last bonus was a decade ago and didn’t even cover my rent for the month I got it.